Visual Workplace

Visual Workplace in a Pre-K Classroom

9 April 2010 0 comments

Dropping my 5 year old off at school today, I remarked at how many visual workplace elements were implemented in her pre-K classroom.  Yes you read that correctly.  These teachers have implemented a bunch of concepts without even explicitly knowing it.  Here are a few examples of visual workplace in the classroom. The floor in [...]

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Lean Office Practices for Repetitive Work

16 March 2010 0 comments

Lean office practices for repetitive work should be the easiest to implement and actually view. For some reason they are rarely implemented in an effective way in office environments. Please reference my previous post on work types to get some context on our first focus area here. Just to summarize, repetitive work in an office [...]

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Visual Management in the Office – Considering the Type of Work

4 March 2010 1 comment

Thinking about visual management in an office setting requires consideration of the work type, just like the factory.  Unfortunately, few companies spend any time at all designing office work utilizing the best practices learned in the factory.  Read my previous post on this here.   In a factory environment, there are many build models.  Some [...]

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Visual Workplace Definition – How You See Performance in the Plant and in the Office

23 February 2010 2 comments

I wrote previously about the lack of any decent definitions of visual workplace (and visual management) on the web.  In fact, what I found was dreadful.  The original post is here.  Amazingly, Wikipedia seems to have deleted the really terrible definition of visual management that I found before.  Now I only find the Lean Manufacturing [...]

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Lean in Support Organizations

3 February 2010 0 comments

In addition to my focus on implementing Lean with systems, I will add commentary on implementing Lean in support organizations.  I have spent much of my career doing this, often as part of bigger improvement efforts.  I am seeing more companies begin to focus on productivity in support and the back office.  The Lean concepts [...]

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Visual Workplace Definition – Have Not Found Any Good Ones

1 February 2010 1 comment

My Japanese colleagues probably reference visual management as often as any other concept and it is easy to see why.  Visual management has broad applicability across a company from the CEO down to the individual contributor, and from manufacturing to finance, to IT.  You might wonder why I have called this a concept.  This is [...]

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